| NATURALLY grandfather on my father's side
was of almost purely Dutch blood. When he was young he still spoke some
Dutch, and Dutch was last used in the services of the Dutch Reformed
Church in New York while he was a small boy.
About 1644 his ancestor Klaes Martensen van
Roosevelt came to New Amsterdam as a "settler"—the euphemistic
name for an immigrant who came over in the steerage of a sailing ship in
the seventeenth century instead of the steerage of a steamer in the
nineteenth century. From that time for the next seven generations from
father to son every one of us was born on Manhattan Island.
My father's paternal ancestors were of
Holland stock; except that there was one named Waldron, a wheelwright, who
was one of the Pilgrims who remained in Holland when the others came over
to found Massachusetts, and who then accompanied the Dutch adventurers to
New Amsterdam. My father's mother was a Pennsylvanian. Her forbears had
come to Pennsylvania with William Penn, some in the same ship with him;
they were of the usual type of the immigration of that particular place
and time. They included Welsh and English Quakers, an Irishman,—with a
Celtic name, and apparently not a Quaker,—and peace-loving Germans, who
were among the founders of Germantown, having been driven from their
Rhineland homes when the armies of Louis the Fourteenth ravaged the
Palatinate; and, in addition, representatives of a by-no-means altogether
peaceful people, the Scotch-Irish, who came to Pennsylvania a little
later, early in the eighteenth century. My grandmother was a woman of
singular sweetness and strength, the keystone of the arch in her relations
with her husband and sons. Although she was not herself Dutch, it was she
who taught me the only Dutch I ever knew, a baby song of which the first
line ran, "Trippe troppa tronjes." I always remembered this, and
when I was in East Africa it proved a bond of union between me and the
Boer settlers, not a few of whom knew it, although at first they always
had difficulty in understanding my pronunciation—at which I do not
wonder. It was interesting to meet these men whose ancestors had gone to
the Cape about the time that mine went to America two centuries and a half
previously, and to find that the descendants of the two streams of
emigrants still crooned to their children some at least of the same
nursery songs.
Of my great-grandfather Roosevelt and his
family life a century and over ago I know little beyond what is implied in
some of his books that have come down to me—the Letters of Junius, a
biography of John Paul Jones, Chief Justice Marshall's "Life of
Washington." They seem to indicate that his library was less
interesting than that of my wife's great-grandfather at the same time,
which certainly included such volumes as the original Edinburgh Review,
for we have then now on our own book-shelves. Of my grandfather Roosevelt
my most vivid childish reminiscence is not something I saw, but a tale
that was told me concerning him. In his boyhood Sunday was as
dismal a day for small Calvinistic children of Dutch descent as if they
had been of Puritan or Scotch Covenanting or French Huguenot descent—and
I speak as one proud of his Holland, Huguenot, and Covenanting ancestors,
and proud that the blood of that stark Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards
flows in the veins of his children. One summer afternoon, after listening
to an unusually long Dutch Reformed sermon for the second time that day,
my grandfather, a small boy, running home before the congregation had
dispersed, ran into a party of pigs, which then wandered free in New
York's streets. He promptly mounted a big boar, which no less promptly
bolted and carried him at full speed through the midst of the outraged
congregation.
Read
his autobiography here! |
